For many, Thanksgiving weekend is a time for seeing movies with your grandparents and/or wiener kids, to relax after a long day of stabbing strangers for discount TVs. It showed at the box office, with the most family-oriented movies – Frozen and Catching Fire – taking all of the money. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, with $110.1 million from Wednesday to Sunday, destroyed the five-day Thanksgiving record previously held by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone ($82.4m), and that was in its second weekend. Catching Fire has now earned $573 million worldwide. That’s a lotta dimp.

Over the same five days, Disney’s Frozen earned an estimated $93 million domestically, no doubt benefiting from actually being pretty good, at least if we’re to judge by its 84% recommended rating on RottenTomatoes and its A+ Cinemascore. I didn’t see it, so I still don’t know what it’s about. Snowmen or some shit?

Elsewhere, Homefront earned a paltry $6.97m for the weekend ($9.8 million for the five-day), which is sad because James Franco playing a drug dealer named Gator Bodine in a Jason Statham film written by Sylvester Stallone sounds like the best thing ever. After Parker and Safe, it’s the third Statham flick in a row to fail to break $10 million. Fourth, if you count Redemption, which opened in just 19 theaters and made less than $40 thousand. Problem is, no one cares about Da Stafe if e’s not knobbin fit birds and droivin flash bloody sazz wagons, do dey, Tommy. Homefront didn’t have sazz wagon one! There’s your problem right there.

Not to kick Spike Lee when he’s down, even though the movie sucked and I think he’s kind of a prick (ibid), but Lee’s remake of Oldboy tanked, earning just $1.25m for the five-day, and $850,000 for the three-day weekend. I actually don’t think you can blame that entirely on the movie (even though, again, it was pretty bad). FilmDistrict only opened it in 583 locations, and without much of a marketing push. And now, after the lukewarm reception, it’s probably not to going to expand much wider. On top of that, I had to ask around just to find a press screening (usually they tell us), and sign a non-disclosure agreement before I could attend. Because God forbid we “spoil” a movie that’s a remake where everyone already knows the twist. OMG, DID YOU GUYS HEAR? THEY SPEAK ENGLISH IN THIS ONE!

Spike Lee’s Oldboy remake got dumped in to 583 locations this weekend. Without much of a marketing push, the movie tanked with just $1.25 million for the five-day frame ($850,000 three-day). Based on these terrible results, it’s unlikely the movie hangs in theaters long enough to make it past the $3 million mark, making this one of the biggest bombs in recent memory. [BoxOfficeMojo]

So, as much as I’d like to blame Oldboy‘s failure on a bad movie and a dumb idea (who was this remake for? the people who already saw the original and are thus pre-disposed to hate any remake? or the people who didn’t see the original and thus probably never even heard of the remake?)… I have to wonder: were they hiding this movie? Were they embarrassed of it? The distributor half-assed it so bad you’d think they were using it as a tax write-off.

Frozen was good. Definitely a throwback Disney musical involving princesses. Little to no contemporary pop culture references. It seems designed to be more of a classic, and yeah, I would not be surprised if it ended up on Broadway one day.

I don’t think it’s worth seeing in 3D, it didn’t add much. But it uses the (now rare for animation) Cinemascope aspect ratio, so see it on the biggest screen you can.

Yeah I was dragged to part 1 and was all like okay, wahtevs”, and was then dragged to part 2 and I was all like “oh hey that was p good!”
Even though alot of people in the theater seemed to hate it/the ending.

I’ve always considered Spike Lee my favorite filmmaker because Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X, He Got Game, Get On The Bus and Mo Better Blues are some of my favorite all time movies. But he’s been slacking big time lately. His documentaries have been pretty good but I can’t tell you how pumped I was for Miracle at St. Anna and that was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in a theater. Red Hook Summer was very disappointing to me too.